Jubal Uses Becky Vesant to Arrange a Call with Douglas

Jubal Uses Becky Vesant to Arrange a Call with Douglas is a brief but consequential chain of personal favors: unable to approach Secretary General Joseph Edgerton Douglas directly, Jubal Harshaw uses the friendship of Becky Vesey and her connection to Agnes Douglas to secure a live call. The scene turns private trust, social access, and even invented astrological authority into instruments for intervening in a political crisis involving Mars.

The route through Agnes Douglas

Jubal is searching for a way to reach Douglas, whose intimate circle is small and whose wife, Agnes, has influence over him. When the possibility of contacting her comes up, the conversation turns to astrology. Jubal says he wants none of it, but his informant explains that Agnes consults an astrologer and that the astrologer can contact her directly. More importantly, Agnes can reach the Secretary General whenever she chooses. The proposed route is therefore not an official channel but a personal chain: astrologer to Agnes, then Agnes to her husband.

The contact is Madame Alexandra Vesant, identified as a woman and as an astrologer in Washington. The informant advises Jubal that she may need to be paid generously. The arrangement rests on knowledge of how influence works around Douglas: not through a formal appointment, but through the person whose attention he will heed. Jubal is skeptical of the astrological premise, yet the practical lead is valuable enough to pursue.

Jubal calls Becky Vesey

Jubal places the call under Madame Vesant’s name and asks the operator to use hush-and-scramble protection, which the connection can accommodate. The screen quickly presents Vesant’s face. Rather than beginning with a formal explanation, Jubal greets her familiarly, and she recognizes him with warmth, calling him Doe Harshaw and asking where he has been. Jubal answers that he has been hiding because the clowns are after him. The exchange establishes that they share an old, easy familiarity, while also making plain that his present danger is serious.

Becky does not demand an explanation before offering help. She immediately asks what he needs and whether he needs money. Jubal says he has money, but that it will not solve the problem; he needs Douglas himself, and needs to speak with him at once. Becky recognizes that this is a difficult request. She is willing to try, but warns that arranging access may take hours and worries about what could happen to Jubal in the meantime. Her offer is meaningful precisely because it is not a routine favor: she is being asked to act quickly without knowing the full nature of the danger.

Astrology as an improvised instrument

Becky asks Jubal for details, saying a horoscope might help her decide what to do. Jubal weighs whether involving her could put her in danger too, and tells her that knowing the situation may expose her unless he can persuade Douglas to act. Becky insists that she has never abandoned a friend in a crisis. He then gives her the astrological shorthand that will shape the intervention: he is Mercury, as a doctor, but the trouble lies in Mars.

Becky asks him to keep the circuit open while she tries to make the connection directly through the phone. She leaves the screen and calls Agnes Douglas. Speaking with confident urgency, she presents the crisis as the very development the stars had foretold and says it has arrived on schedule. Her account of a rare alignment among Mars, Venus, and Mercury is not a calculated horoscope: the narration makes clear that the stated configuration does not actually obtain, and Becky has had no time to compute a new chart. She improvises instead, using astrological language as a persuasive framework for advice she believes will help her friends.

The improvisation gives Agnes an intelligible role. Becky identifies Venus with Agnes, Mars with both her husband and the young man Smith during the crisis, and Mercury with Jubal. She tells Agnes that Venus must sustain Mercury to counterbalance the reinforced Mars, and that there is little time before Venus reaches the meridian. The astrology supplies urgency and a personal rationale for action, not reliable celestial information. Its practical force lies in making Agnes feel that she is both needed and able to help.

From private favor to a direct call

Becky reassures Agnes that she has been waiting by the phone and that the stars reveal the nature of a crisis, not its details. The explanation lets her frame the sudden request as a moment for Agnes to act, while withholding the underlying facts. Agnes agrees to extract Joseph from a conference and asks Becky to keep the line open, either by giving her Jubal’s number or transferring the call. Becky can transfer it herself and urges Agnes to hurry.

The sequence ends with the call reaching its intended target. After a brief wait, Douglas appears on the screen, identified as Secretary General of the World Federation of Free Nations, and addresses Jubal directly. The arrangement has carried Jubal from a guarded call to a conversation with the official he believes is the only person who can help. The passage establishes the connection and the urgency that brought it about; it does not, by itself, resolve the crisis.

Significance of the scene

The call is made possible by overlapping forms of access: Jubal’s old friendship with Becky, Becky’s willingness to help without first hearing the whole story, Agnes’s influence over her husband, and the astrologer’s ability to speak to Agnes in terms she accepts. The official machinery of government remains in the background. What opens the channel is a chain of trust and persuasion operating through personal relationships.

Becky’s knowingly improvised horoscope adds a pointed contrast between factual accuracy and practical effect. She is not claiming to have calculated the sky correctly; she presents a fabricated configuration as a means of giving Agnes confidence and hastening action. The scene thus makes astrological language less a source of knowledge than a social instrument, one Becky uses to help two friends at once. Jubal’s skepticism does not prevent him from relying on the network built around it, and the direct appearance of Douglas supplies the concrete result: the favor succeeds in getting the necessary conversation started.